So I post my blog entry, go out to the Karaoke bar for a glass of merlot at a Rick Astley song, and when I get back, Richard Cheese has responded.
As I expected, he’s a thoughtful and well-spoken guy. I won’t quote the letter in full but I will give you this, because it’s important.
i [...]

Just checked out WALL-E. It was a wonderful animated film, maybe the best one to date from Disney/Pixar.
It does something no Pixar film has yet done: mix live-action inserts into the realistically animated scenes. WALL-E, the incredibly cute robotic protagonist of the piece, has a job compacting garbage in the ruins of an abandoned city [...]

You’re at home, trying to enjoy your new post-2009-ready digital TV. But what you’re seeing is something like slow-motion crash test footage. The major networks are slowly– excruciatingly slowly– being crunched into shapelessness by the WGA strike. Sure, “American Idol” is back on (and you’re welcome to it), and God help us the revived [...]

I swear– I never thought it would happen. An official Kurt Cobain biopic has been greenlighted. Universal is set to produce the film and David Benioff (The Kite Runner) has been tapped to write it.
Very exciting news! Was a pretty big Nirvana fan back in the days. That’s not entirely true– I actually started out [...]

In this article we’re going to discover why “The Brady Bunch” owes so much to Godzilla.
I had the pleasure of watching a Netflix DVD loaned to me by Chris, my business partner: Matango (1963). It was known in the US as “Attack of the Mushroom People.” It scared the living crap out me when [...]

(An open letter to American Film Producers)
Dear Powerful, Connected American Film Producers (you know who you are!):
I was reflecting on the Henry Darger article and it got me thinking about L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. I read them all– My family inherited my great-grandmother’s original hardbounds, and they were the first full-sized books I ever [...]

“Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned,” NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton said. “If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [...]

EMI, the music company which owns the rights to all the Beatles songs, and Apple Corp, the computer company which runs iTunes, made an announcement a few minutes ago. No, not the one you’re thinking. The other one.
EMI will be the first major label to offer DRM-free music on iTunes. It’s a kind of good [...]

I’ve been saying this for years now but didn’t have hard evidence to back me up… file sharing (or as the RIAA calls it, intellectual property theft) doesn’t hurt sales, and therefore the industry is in fact NOT losing 3 billion dollars a year to it.
And now, the hard evidence. Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard and [...]

Maybe the biggest problem the intellectual property lawyers have is that they are trying to portray file sharing as immoral theft, but they keep making news for suing 12-year-old girls, broke college students, and now a half-paralyzed stroke victim in Michigan. In honor of this, I’m going to encourage everyone to swap Ian Drury songs. Drury [...]